How cheap is traveling cheap for you? Find out what others are spending

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It’s funny how history relates to travel. Year after year, vacation after vacation, so many of us travel to see historic sites and get excited in front of stones, statues, ancient buildings or battlefields that changed the course of history. I loved Ephesus, I was so impressed when I visited it, that for many years I dreamed to go back there again someday. I was impressed by the suspended monasteries at Meteora, by the Luxor and Karnak temples and by many other relics of the past. When it comes to tourism, history sells.

There’s another way history influenced nowadays travel: it split the world in rich countries and poor countries. If you’re born in a rich country, you don’t need to do exceptionally well from local point of view, in order to be able to travel the world. If you’re born in a poor country, you might be doing well in your local environment, but the moment you step outside your country, you’ll have to face the same expenses as all other travelers, and this could restrict your limits a lot. Besides, rich countries aren’t happy to have people from poor countries visiting, even if it’s for travel purposes only. They fear illegal immigration, so they can be very fussy about giving visas.

Last week I was reading about reasons why you can’t travel. Lis sees two good ones: the impossibility of getting travel insurance and the wrong passport. Being a citizen of a poor country will most probably bring you “the wrong passport”, in addition to an increased inability of saving money for your trips. Thanks to Lis, I discovered another travel blog, run by Mina Mahrous, an Egyptian who explains his point of view regarding the general current of opinion that everybody can travel: No, not everyone can travel. Read Mina’s article, it’s very interesting and it resonates with my thoughts.

Average monthly income in European countries (USD) – Source: wikipedia

If we look at the monthly average salary in European countries, we see how hard it is for somebody from Romania, for instance, to travel to Norway or to Finland, where they will need to face the same expenses as locals who earn in one month as much as the average Romanian earns in one year. On the other hand, Americans among others will be happy to visit Romania and spend only $35 a day, if they travel on a budget. For many Romanians, that’s a big budget. One can’t just save for a few years, then take a gap year and travel the world. Most people here save a whole year to afford one week vacation with their family.

Here’s the result of a “vacation” survey done by GfK Association in 2010:

GfK – vacation spending survey

You can see that 61% of the respondents in Eastern and Central Europe said they were going to spend their vacation at home. Bulgarians lead with 71% of the respondents stating they were not going anywhere on vacation. Romanians follow them closely with 70% people staying at home. Hungarians came pretty close, 65% of them saying they had no travel intentions. Maybe some of them had reasons other than the lack of money, but I suspect the majority did not intend to travel because after they paid for basic living needs they were left with nothing. Another striking fact is that nobody in Central/Eastern Europe intended to spend more than $2472 per person for their vacation. The survey included 16,364 persons. You can see more details on marketresearchbulletin.com

Expenses of travel bloggers

When I choose my destinations, I like to read travel blogs, to see what other people recommend and how much they spend to live in those places. I believe blogs are better than travel guides, for a few reasons, one of them being that while guides are written for all types of travelers, blogs are written from a personal perspective which helps us identifying whether or not such and such experience would suit us or if we the kind of money that’s required or not.
I did a little research and came up with this list of travel bloggers and the amount of money they spent:

Some of the above figures include air fares, others don’t. I put them together just to get a rough idea about what one needs to spend per day, be it in a round-the-world trip or in a short vacation. As you can see, the lowest figure is $13 per day, per person, if you go to Thailand or Ecuador. There are probably more places where you can fit within that budget. If you have something to add to my list, please feel free to do so in the comments.

Anyway, I guess we can call it “cheap” when it costs less than what we’d pay if we stayed home, no matter which country we are residents of, be it poor or rich. Or maybe not? What’s cheap for you? How much do you spend per day when you are at home? How much do you spend for traveling every year?

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Violeta writes for people who want to design, research and plan their own travel experiences. After two decades of working in advertising and marketing, she decided to pursue her two passions, to travel the world and to write about it. Since 2012, she authors and administrates a network of travel blogs.

8 Comments

Thanks for linking to me! Travel is definitely not as expensive as a lot of people think, and even my budget that you listed could’ve been lower if I had taken buses more like most people. I just flew because I could afford it and I got really sick of the buses. Travel is a wonderful thing, and all it takes is some planning and saving, and just buy that ticket!

Hi Ali, thank you for writing such a thorough article about your expenses. Indeed, travel is wonderful, I love it, too! I agree about the buses, I had the “pleasure” and I avoid them whenever I can since then.

This is a great discussion and round-up of long term travel expenses. Budgeting and costs are one of the first questions that come to the minds of aspiring travellers, so it’s great that you’ve listed articles that provide specific dollar figures. Thanks for linking to my post about my round-the-world flight prices!

You are welcome, Lily, I thank you for writing that post. As of budgeting, it’s funny, $13 a day is what I spend when I stay home, so it’s hard for me to have the joy of spending less while traveling 🙂

Actually, the numbers you’ve got on the income, certainly for Spain, Portugal and England are wrong… I’m from Portugal myself, living in England and in Portugal the average salary is 400 Euros and this hasn’t changed for the last few years, same for Spain, give or take one or two hundred euros.

For England is below or around 2000 pounds too, but this depends on the area you see… London has ridiculously high salaries for some professions due to just being London whilst as you move away, it tends to get lower. Living costs in London are also ridiculously expensive. Not the nicest of places to go unless you’re splurging during your long term travels although you can find cheap accommodation if you’re willing to.

Some countries are very, very expensive as you pointed out (Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria…) but not as high as the numbers shown on the first image. However spending a weekend there only can be quite expensive!!

Just thought I’d write this out to help anyone else.

Portugal is quite cheap for traveling and food, England not so much! One of the cheapest traveling destinations in Europe is also Spain, even the more tacky destinations.

I suppose that the Euro and the Pound Sterling being stronger currencies than the US Dollar doesn’t help either.

Let me know if you’ve got any questions though!! Just found some of your posts interesting but thought I’d clear up my personal view on this one. 🙂

I liked the post so much..quite realistic and true..not like all the travel blogs I always read
Especially that I am from egypt like mina(the blogger) you mentioned .so , I know what it is when planning to travel long terms and to different countries consecutively..I think I need to save up money for about one to two years for a 2 or 3 weeks vacation 😀 and it has to be somewhere cheap like asia or africa not of course us or europe …

Hi Ziad, thank you for your nice words. Indeed, we have to plan our travels wiser and work harder to save the money. In addition, our opportunities to work while traveling are also limited, as we aren’t native English speakers, so we can’t take English teaching jobs abroad. Nonetheless, with a little luck and a lot of work, anyone can travel long term, if they are willing to give up some of their comfort.